In Taiwan, there is a great demand for effective strategies to teach English literacy skills. English textbooks used in elementary schools contain mostly short dialogues, and vocabulary and sentence exercises are usually controlled and graded linearly. These materials often don’t deliver meaningful, interesting, and effective literacy learning experiences.

In 2013, I worked with a group of elementary school English teachers to develop theme-based English reading and writing lessons to partially replace textbooks. Each theme consisted of children’s books of various genres, poetry, songs, or videos. We chose topics that were interesting and relevant to students’ lives, such as dentist visits, pet care, traveling, and cooking.

Reading materials were selected based on a few criteria: First, they had to be interesting and connect to students’ life experiences. Next, they had to be authentic materials that were not modified for the purpose of language teaching. Last, the language needed to be appropriate and not-too-challenging.

Writing is usually the aspect of language learning that second and foreign language learners find most frustrating. In our theme-based, meaning-focused teaching, we made sure that writing activities always came as a natural extension of reading activities. Students always wrote to express personal meaning. In the writing activities we designed, there was never a “correct answer.” Unlike writing activities recommended by textbooks, we never asked students to write copy or practice patterns. High achieving students were free to share what they wanted to say, and low achieving students practiced guided writing such as fill-in-the-blank prompts or sentence completion supported with word banks.

We were very curious about the effectiveness of this theme-based and meaning-based literacy teaching endeavor, so we conducted quasi-experimental research and invited another school of a similar size and parent socioeconomic status background in the same city to be the control group. Students from both schools received English reading and writing proficiency pre- and post-test. It was a delight to see that our students performed significantly better after receiving only one semester (four months) of this theme- and meaning-based literacy instruction. Interviews with students also revealed that they preferred the experimental instruction and wanted it to continue.

We put meaning and student interest at the forefront of what we chose and organized for students to read and to write. All educational and learning theories say that meaning and student motivation is important. What we learned is that while all English teaching theories and classroom research are important, the “meaning first” truth goes a long way. When meaning and student interests become the priority, everything else comes naturally in helping students to learn a new language.

Yueh-Nu Hung is an associate professor in the Department of English at the National Taichung University of Education in Taiwan. She is the director of the Center for Research on Elementary English Teaching, a project funded by the Ministry of Education of Taiwan that works on preservice and inservice elementary school English teacher training.

Yueh-Nu Hung will present a session titled “Finding Meaning in Literacy Learning: Classroom Strategies in Second and Foreign Language Literacy Instruction” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.